Photographer Pieter Hugo spends 10 days documenting the forgotten homeless people of L.A. http://gqm.ag/1NLMuam
Portraits of Skid Row http://gqm.ag/1LPYUzi
1/30/15
Child Poverty
The sharp rise in renting costs has left 27% of households spending 50% of their income on housing. http://bit.ly/1A3FXVJ
The changing face of US #poverty has left millions of families w/out access to needed services + infrastructure. http://bit.ly/1Dkdzwi
View summary
Tomato pickers now have decent conditions in FL b/c of @FairFoodProgram yet @wendys @kroger @Publix won’t join. http://bit.ly/1yWkaxJ
Staggering stat: From 1979-2012, the 1%’s income grew by 181% yet the rest only by 2.6%. http://bit.ly/1uvXtuD #inequality
Shocking stat: 50% of renters spend >30% of their gross income on housing; 27% spend >50% w the poor hit hardest http://bit.ly/1A3FXVJ
This is how we can reduce child poverty by 60 percent right now, by Marion Wright Edelmanhttp://bit.ly/18yuKRd pic.twitter.com/C1IbAb5aDS
Literacy
Literacy is an area where we can have a profound effect on people's lives. If you cannot read in this modern age, it puts you at a severe disadvantage.
Teaching people to read and write is a very direct way to help the disadvantaged.
One in six adults struggles to read. (UK)
Source:
http://readingagency.org.uk/adults/quick-guides/reading-well/
Source:
https://twitter.com/readingagency
Today, we came across the awesome Tumblr Bookshelfies (via Business Insider)
What is a "bookshelfie," you might ask? Well, it's a selfie taken in front of your bookshelf, of course! (the contributors also list some of the books that can be found on their bookshelves.
This is definitely our favorite bookish thing on the Internet right now.
Submit your own on the Tumblr!
Link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/20/bookshelfies-_n_3785796.html?ncid=edlinkusaolp00000003
High Rent Blues
BillMoyers.com@BillMoyersHQ
In 2000s, more than 2/3 of the #poverty increase in metro areas occurred in the suburbs http://bit.ly/1Dkdzwi
12/30/14
Well-Read in 100 Books
Isn’t it strange that we have the term “well-read” but absolutely no one can come close to defining it?
And isn’t also strange that other art forms don’t have equivalent terms for a vague sense of someone’s total experience of that form (well-seen for movies? well-heard for music? Absurd).
Thinking about this recently sucked me into a little thought-experiment: say someone had never read any literature and wanted to be well-read. What should they read? And how many books would it take them to get close?
This hypothetical forces any given answerer to do two things: provide their personal definition of well-read and then give a list of books that might satisfy that definition. The first hurdle to clear is cultural position: who is this person? As I can only provide a reasonable list of books from my own cultural position, I have to assume that this person is like me, at least in a very basic way: an alive American who can read English.
“Well-read” for this person then has a number of connotations: a familiarity with the monuments of Western literature, an at least passing interest in the high-points of world literature, a willingness to experience a breadth of genres, a special interest in the work of one’s immediate culture, a desire to share in the same reading experiences of many other readers, and an emphasis on the writing of the current day.
The following 100 books (of fiction, poetry, and drama) is an attempt to satisfy those competing requirements.
After going through several iterations of the list, one thing surprised me: there are not as many “classic” books that I associate with the moniker well-read, and many more current books than I would have thought. Conversely, to be conversant in the literature of the day turned out to be quite a bit more important than I would have thought.
As for the number of 100: in addition to being a nice, round number, it is also a number that, at a one-book-every-two-week pace this hypothetical reader could accomplish in just about four years–the standard length of an undergraduate program.
So here’s the list, in alphabetical order:
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Source: http://bookriot.com/2013/06/13/from-zero-to-well-read-in-100-books/
And isn’t also strange that other art forms don’t have equivalent terms for a vague sense of someone’s total experience of that form (well-seen for movies? well-heard for music? Absurd).
Thinking about this recently sucked me into a little thought-experiment: say someone had never read any literature and wanted to be well-read. What should they read? And how many books would it take them to get close?
This hypothetical forces any given answerer to do two things: provide their personal definition of well-read and then give a list of books that might satisfy that definition. The first hurdle to clear is cultural position: who is this person? As I can only provide a reasonable list of books from my own cultural position, I have to assume that this person is like me, at least in a very basic way: an alive American who can read English.
“Well-read” for this person then has a number of connotations: a familiarity with the monuments of Western literature, an at least passing interest in the high-points of world literature, a willingness to experience a breadth of genres, a special interest in the work of one’s immediate culture, a desire to share in the same reading experiences of many other readers, and an emphasis on the writing of the current day.
The following 100 books (of fiction, poetry, and drama) is an attempt to satisfy those competing requirements.
After going through several iterations of the list, one thing surprised me: there are not as many “classic” books that I associate with the moniker well-read, and many more current books than I would have thought. Conversely, to be conversant in the literature of the day turned out to be quite a bit more important than I would have thought.
As for the number of 100: in addition to being a nice, round number, it is also a number that, at a one-book-every-two-week pace this hypothetical reader could accomplish in just about four years–the standard length of an undergraduate program.
So here’s the list, in alphabetical order:
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
- The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
- The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
- All Quiet on the Western Front by Eric Maria Remarque
- The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay by Michael Chabon
- American Pastoral by Philip Roth
- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
- Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery
- Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
- The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
- Beloved by Toni Morrison
- Beowulf
- The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
- Brave New World by Alduos Huxley
- The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
- The Call of the Wild by Jack London
- Candide by Voltaire
- The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
- Casino Royale by Ian Fleming
- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
- The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
- Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White
- Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
- The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
- The Complete Stories of Edgar Allan Poe
- The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor
- The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
- Crime & Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
- Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
- Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
- Dream of Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin
- Dune by Frank Herbert
- Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
- Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
- The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
- Faust by Goethe
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
- Game of Thrones by George RR Martin
- The Golden Bowl by Henry James
- The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
- Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
- The Gospels
- The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
- Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Hamlet by William Shakespeare
- The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
- Harry Potter & The Sorceror’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
- Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
- The Help by Kathryn Stockett
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
- The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
- House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday
- Howl by Allen Ginsberg
- The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
- if on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino
- The Iliad by Homer
- The Inferno by Dante
- Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
- Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
- Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
- The Life of Pi by Yann Martel
- The Lion, the Witch, and The Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
- The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exepury
- Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
- Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
- Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
- Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
- Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
- Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
- The Odyssey by Homer
- Oedipus, King by Sophocles
- On the Road by Jack Kerouac
- A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
- The Pentateuch
- Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen
- Rabbit, Run by John Updike
- The Road by Cormac McCarthy
- Romeo & Juliet by William Shakespeare
- The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
- Slaughterhouse-5 by Kurt Vonnegut
- The Sound and The Fury by William Faulkner
- The Stand by Stephen King
- The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
- Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust
- Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
- Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
- The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
- Ulysses by James Joyce
- The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
- A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
- Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee
- Watchmen by Alan Moore
- The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
- Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
- 1984 by George Orwell
- 50 Shades of Grey by E.L. James
Sign up for our newsletter to have the best of Book Riot delivered straight to your inbox every two weeks. No spam. We promise.
To keep up with Book Riot on a daily basis, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, , and subscribe to the Book Riot podcast in iTunes or via RSS. So much bookish goodness–all day, every day.
Source: http://bookriot.com/2013/06/13/from-zero-to-well-read-in-100-books/
New York Homeless Numbers Climb
Architects work on better design for homeless shelters
New York City Homelessness: Rate Up 23 Percent (STUDY)
On Jan. 30, the Department of Homeless Services and volunteers for the organization counted an estimated 3,262 homeless people living on the streets -- a 23 percent increase from the 2,648 counted in 2011, according to the Wall Street Journal.
In January the coalition released a report citing the current administration -- specifically that of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg -- for the record-breaking number of homeless men, women and children. It called the homeless policy shift "disastrous", and foreshadowed another increase in homelessness as "expected in the coming months," the organization said in a statement.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/30/new-york-city-homelessness_n_1465340.htmlThe number of New Yorkers struggling with homelessness has reached unprecedented levels under a leader that vowed to take on the growing crisis.
In Mayor Bill de Blasio's first year in office, the number of people living in homeless shelters rose to 58,913 -- an all-time high -- WNYC reported. Although de Blasio inherited a dire situation (homelessness jumped 71 percent on Mayor Michael Bloomberg's watch, according to the Coalition for the Homeless), about 3,000 more people are living without stable shelter now than in October, despite new programs designed to fight homelessness that went into effect this past fall.
The current mayor's administration says that although they cannot specify exactly when the city can expect homelessness to begin declining, the initiatives -- namely, programs targeting disproportionately affected groups -- should improve conditions down the road.
While homelessness has climbed to new heights in New York City, overall rates have declined nationwide, a 2014 study by the National Alliance to End Homelessness found. The number of homeless people in the U.S. dropped by more than 152,000 between 2005 and 2013. The survey noted that successes and setbacks in combating homelessness varied from region to region.
Note: Many homeless people avoid using shelters because of bed bugs, bullying, and criminal behavior within the shelter populations.
12/28/14
Nashville shelter to Swedish star
How a 63yo singer went from Nashville shelter to Swedish star http://bittersoutherner.com/doug-seegers-nashville-skyline#.VJressAEN … (@MaxBlau, new @BitterSouth)
Source:longform.org
Longform
@longform
The best articles on the web, recommended daily. Also:@LongformApp/@LongformPodcast.
Brooklyn, NY
longform.org
2/28/14
Houses Built for the Homeless
The Bold Italic
These Awesome Tiny Houses Were Built for the Homeless
These Awesome Tiny Houses Were Built for the Homeless by Oakland artist Gregory Kloehn rose to fame in 2011, when he created small homes made out of transformed dumpsters. Taking what he learned from making these mini living spaces, he's started a new project building brightly colored tiny houses out of found materials and donating them to the homeless.
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Kloehn builds his houses using discarded materials he finds on the streets. Oakland has a horrible illegal dumping problem, so it's rad that he's solving two problems with one project. Although made from trash, Kloehn's homes are sturdy. They're also constructed with the basic living needs of the homeless in mind: they're built on wheels so they can be moved around, and they provide privacy, shelter from the elements, and a space for sleeping (some are even big enough to stand in).
1/22/14
Serenity Parayer Adapted for ADD
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change;
The insight to prioritize wisely what I want to change;
The patience to resist trying to control everything I could, had I the energy and time;
The courage and skill to change the things I have chosen to change;
And the wisdom to know the differences among all these.
- Dr. Edward Hallowell
10/14/13
Thanksgiving Dinner 2013
La Loma, Haiti: A girl, whose Haitian-born grandfather emigrated to the Dominican Republic in 1950, watches cornmeal cook for breakfast at her family's home. A court ruling retroactively denies Dominican nationality to anyone born after 1929 who does not have at least one parent of Dominican blood
Link: http://www.theguardian.com/news/gallery/2013/oct/13/weekend-in-pictures?CMP=twt_gu#/?picture=419831971&index=2
10/1/13
Jon's Jail Journal (by Shaun Attwood)
ploaded on Feb 22, 2012 Prison survival tips: http://jonsjailjournal.blogspot.com/2...... Jail survival guide: http://jonsjailjournal.blogspot.com/2...... Hard Time http://shaunattwood.com/index.php?opt...... .. Brutal murder of inmate, Robert Cotton, by Aryan Brother, Pete Van Winkle, in Sheriff Joe Arpaio's Maricopa County jail. Phoenix, Arizona. Category News & Politics License Standard YouTube License Introduction to his Blog:
I started Jon's Jail Journal back in 2004 to expose the conditions in the maximum-security Madison Street jail, Phoenix, Arizona, run by the infamous Sheriff Joe Arpaio. I wrote with a golf pencil sharpened on a cement-block wall or metal door, and my aunt Ann, who visited every weekend, smuggled my writing out of the jail. My parents in England posted my writing to the Internet. The blog went on to attract international media attention, and the Madison Street jail was shut down a few years later.
Sheriff Joe Arpaio is still in charge of the Maricopa County jail system and its various facilities. His detractors call him the Angel of Death, not just because of the abnormally high amount of murder and death in his jails, but also because he actually promoted guards that the federal court had found responsible for murdering inmates.
Where I was housed, there were only two guards supervising hundreds of inmates, so gangs like the Mexican Mafia had more control over the inmates than the guards. I got used to the sound of heads getting smashed against steel toilets and bodies getting thrown around. Here's a video of an Aryan Brother murdering another inmate in the jail:
On the right hand side of this blog below the banner is an archive menu you can click on. If you click back to March 2004 you can read the early blog entries.
Here are excerpts from the first two blogs I wrote:
Source:
http://jonsjailjournal.blogspot.ca/2009/12/welcome-guardian-readers-i-started-jons.html
Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ba_vGzkcdHQ
9/24/13
Poverty harms brain power, hard to escape: study
See more Pictures at : http://digital-photography-school.com/17-images-of-poverty
Poverty harms brain power, hard to escape: study
By Sheryl Ubelacker The Canadian Press
TORONTO – Dealing with poverty takes up so much mental energy that the poor have less brain power for making decisions and taking steps to overcome their financial difficulties, a study suggests.
The research, published Thursday in the journal Science, concludes that a person’s cognitive abilities can be diminished by such nagging concerns as hanging on to a place to live and having enough money to feed their families.
As a result, there is less “mental bandwidth” left over for education, training, time-management and other steps that could help break the cycle of poverty, the researchers contend.
“Previous accounts of poverty have blamed the poor for their personal failings, or an environment that is not conducive to success,” said Jiaying Zhao of the University of British Columbia, who led the study, conducted while she was a graduate student at Princeton University.
“We’re arguing that being poor can impair cognitive functioning, which hinders individuals’ ability to make good decisions and can cause further poverty,” she said.
The study had two parts. In the first, about 400 people at a New Jersey mall were randomly selected to take part in a number of standard cognitive and logic tests. The participants’ annual family income ranged from $20,000 to $160,000, with a median of $70,000.
Subjects took the computer-based tests after being presented with a hypothetical financial problem that they would later have to solve: how they would come up with the money to pay for having their car fixed when the cost was either $150 or $1,500.
With the lower amount on their minds, those with low incomes fared as well on the tests as better-off participants. But when the amount was 10 times higher, low-income subjects performed far more poorly on the tests, said Zhao.
On average, a person preoccupied with money problems showed a reduction in cognitive function equivalent to a 13-point drop in IQ or the loss of a night’s sleep.
“It’s a big jump,” she said of the dip in IQ. “It pushes you from average (intelligence) to borderline (mental disability).”
In the second study, the researchers went into the field to test their theory in a real-life situation — with about 460 sugarcane farmers in 54 Indian villages who earn all their yearly income at the time of the annual harvest.
“That creates interesting dynamics because in the months before the harvest, they’re really poor, they’re running out,” Zhao said. “Whereas, in the months right after the harvest, they’re rich.
“So you can literally look within the same individual at how he or she performs when poor versus when rich.”
The researchers found that farmers showed diminished cognitive performance before getting paid for their harvest, compared to after the sugarcane crop was gathered in, when they had greater wealth.
They said these changes in cognitive abilities could not be explained by differences in nutrition, physical exertion or stress.
“So the very context of not having enough resources impedes your cognitive function,” Zhao said. That reduces a person’s mental ability to address elements that could help them break out of poverty, for instance, a higher level of education, a better-paying job and enrolment in social programs to help attain those goals.
“You are simply unable to notice those things when you are preoccupied by poverty concerns.”
The fallout from neglecting other areas of life can exacerbate already trying financial woes, said co-author Eldar Shafir, a professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton.
Late fees tacked onto unpaid rent and other bills or a job lost because of poor time management can make an already-tight money situation worse, Shafir said in a statement.
And as people become more impoverished, they tend to make decisions that perpetuate their financial hardship, such as excessive borrowing, he added.
The researchers suggest that services for the poor shouldn’t “cognitively tax” them.
Positive measures could include simpler aid forms, more guidance for receiving assistance, and more flexibly structured training and educational programs.
“When (people living in poverty) make mistakes, the outcomes of errors are more dear,” Shafir said. “So, if you are poor, you’re more error prone and errors cost you more dearly. It’s hard to find a way out.”
Dennis Raphael, a professor of health policy and management at Toronto’s York University , said the findings are consistent with previous research on the effects of a lack of “attentional resources” among the poor.
The authors’ recommend that “services for the poor should accommodate the dominance that poverty has on a person’s time and thinking … so that a person who has stumbled can more easily try again,” he said.
Read more@
Source: http://metronews.ca/news/victoria/781039/poverty-harms-brain-power-hard-to-escape-study/
9/23/13
Once Suicidal and Shipped Off in what is known as Greyhound Therapy
September 21, 2013
Once Suicidal and Shipped Off, Now Battling Nevada Over Care
By RICK LYMAN
SAN FRANCISCO — David Theisen keeps his legal papers in a frayed yellow envelope in his tiny transients’ hotel room, a toilet down the hall, the covers of his beloved comic books, with titles like “Dark Mysteries” and “Vault of Horror,” lining the drab walls.
A lot has changed in the year and a half since Mr. Theisen, 52 and homeless, threatened to kill himself with a butcher knife and ended up in a Las Vegas psychiatric center. After one night, Mr. Theisen found himself on a bus to San Francisco, several sack lunches and a day’s worth of medication clutched in his lap.
“Technically, they shouldn’t have been allowed to send me anywhere,” Mr. Theisen said. “They should have put me in a little room until I got better.”
Now, Mr. Theisen is at the center of a class-action lawsuit brought this month by San Francisco’s city attorney, Dennis Herrera, against the State of Nevada on behalf of 24 mentally ill and homeless people.
They were all, like Mr. Theisen, bused out of Nevada and left on the streets of San Francisco with little or no medication.
But that is just a small sampling, Mr. Herrera says, of the estimated 1,500 people who were bused all over the country in recent years from the state-operated Rawson-Neal Psychiatric Center in Las Vegas and other Nevada institutions, 500 of them to California.
“It’s horrifying,” Mr. Herrera said. “I think we can all agree that our most vulnerable and at-risk people don’t deserve this sort of treatment: no meds, no medical care, a destination where they have no contacts and know no one.”
But what makes it “even more tragic,” Mr. Herrera said, “is that on top of the inhumane treatment, the State of Nevada was trying to have another jurisdiction shoulder the financial responsibility for caring for these people.”
Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, who has several weeks to respond to Mr. Herrera’s lawsuit, has declined to comment in the meantime.
Mary Woods, a spokeswoman for the Nevada Department of Health and Human Services, laid out the state’s position in an e-mail. Outside a handful of instances, the state believes that its Client Transportation Back to Home Communities program was operated properly and that it is not dissimilar from programs in other jurisdictions, including San Francisco.
Hospitals in several cities have programs intended to reunite discharged psychiatric patients with their families and hometowns. Where abuses occur, Mr. Herrera and others say, is when patients are shipped off with little or no oversight about where they are going and what will happen once they get there.
Nevada officials say that besides a single, well-documented case, they believe that the Rawson-Neal staff followed proper release procedures in almost all of the remaining cases they have investigated.
That single case, involving a man named James F. Brown who was sent by bus to Sacramento, a city where he knew no one, from the Vegas hospital in February, was the subject of an article in The Sacramento Bee.
That newspaper article not only prompted the San Francisco city attorney’s office to look into the Nevada policy, but it also led to a federal investigation.
“This has certainly elevated attention of a practice that, frankly, has probably gone on for many years in a number of states,” said Ronald S. Honberg, legal director for the National Alliance on Mental Illness in Washington. “We’ve never done a study, and I’ve never seen one anybody else did, but we have certainly heard over the years a number of stories that this sort of practice goes on.
It’s something we refer to, euphemistically, as Greyhound therapy.”
Mr. Theisen’s experience began when he and another homeless man tried to hitchhike across the Mojave Desert from Las Vegas to San Diego. They made it about 45 miles to the small town of Primm, little more than a cluster of casinos.
The two men, desperate and hungry, ordered a meal and then ran before the bill arrived. They did not make it. His friend was arrested, but Mr. Theisen went to a pay phone and called the authorities. “I told them I had a knife and was going to kill myself,” he said. “After the dine-and-dash, I just gave up.”
He begged not to be sent back onto the streets of Las Vegas, he said, and did not care where they shipped him. “They asked me what kind of work I had done, and I said I was a cook,” he said. “So some young woman said, ‘Well, there are a lot of restaurants in San Francisco.’ ”
Mr. Theisen said he eventually wound up at the Rawson-Neal facility, where he spent the night.
The next morning, he said, his doctors sent him to a Greyhound station with seven sack lunches and a day’s medication for the 14-hour ride.
He arrived with three lunches left and $30 on a food stamps card, and bounced from shelter to shelter until he managed to get a room in a downtown transients’ hotel.
Rumors of such journeys had become part of California homeless lore.
“In San Francisco, it’s been urban myth for decades that this sort of practice was going on,” Mr. Herrera said. “But this is the first instance that I am aware of where we have been able to document a state-supported and state-sanctioned effort.”
Ms. Woods, the spokeswoman for Nevada’s health agency, said that from July 1, 2008, to March 31, the state bought out-of-state bus tickets for 4.7 percent of the patients it discharged, an estimated 1,473 people.
“The findings show there were 10 instances in the course of five years where there was not enough documentation to know for certain if staff confirmed there was housing/shelter and supportive services at the destination,” she said.
The federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, however, said last month that its inquiry showed a more widespread problem.
About 40 percent of the mental patients discharged by the hospital went into local homeless shelters or were shipped elsewhere, the federal investigators said, and most of those were sent directly to a Greyhound bus station with a ticket but without proper documentation or instructions on what they should do when they arrive.
Some medical staff members at Rawson-Neal were fired after the furor following the Bee report, Ms. Woods said, and the hospital strengthened its discharge protocols. Gov. Brian Sandoval of Nevada pushed the Legislature to approve, which it did, $30.4 million in additional mental health spending, including $2.1 million for Rawson-Neal.
Mr. Herrera is not satisfied. He wants proof that the new protocols are in place, as well as compensation for all the city has spent to care for the patients from Nevada. He is also talking to other California cities about joining him in the lawsuit.
“I am hopeful that shining a light on this will also shine a light on other jurisdictions around the country to make the point that this is not going to be tolerated,” he said.
It has been a tough year for Rawson-Neal. In July, it lost its accreditation, a decision that it did not fight. Of greater concern is a move by federal officials to possibly end Rawson-Neal’s eligibility for Medicare financing.
Mr. Theisen now subsists on $100 in assistance from the city every month, which with his free room, is just enough if he is careful. He gets the medication he needs for his depression and spends his days at the public library or roaming the city looking for work as a cook. The important thing is that now, for the first time, he can see a way forward.
“I guess they shouldn’t have done what they did in Nevada, but I cannot say enough about what this city has done for me,” he said. “It’s awesome, really. I have to struggle, yes, but otherwise life is good. I don’t wake up sad anymore.”
Source: Once Suicidal and Shipped Off
8/31/13
Robbie Burns and Fickle Fate
Good one! Be here now. Awaken to the moment because it is all we really have.
There is a Scots poem written by Robert Burns in 1785, and was included in the Kilmarnock volume. According to legend, Burns wrote the poem after finding a nest full of mice during the winter.
Robbie Burns talks about the futility of trusting foresight in the face of fickle fate in his note to a mouse:
To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough:
The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!
There is a Scots poem written by Robert Burns in 1785, and was included in the Kilmarnock volume. According to legend, Burns wrote the poem after finding a nest full of mice during the winter.
Robbie Burns talks about the futility of trusting foresight in the face of fickle fate in his note to a mouse:
To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough:
But little Mouse, you are not alone,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes of mice and men
Go often awry,
And leave us nothing but grief and pain,
For promised joy!
Still you are blessed, compared with me!
The present only touches you:
But oh! I backward cast my eye,
On prospects dreary!
And forward, though I cannot see,
I guess and fear!
The first stanza of the poem is read by Ian Anderson in the beginning of the 2007 remaster of "One Brown Mouse" by Jethro Tull. Anderson adds the line "But a mouse is a mouse, for all that," at the end of the stanza, which is a reference to another of Burns' songs, "Is There for Honest Poverty", commonly known as "A Man's a Man for A' That".
My spell checker doesn't like Gaelic...In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes of mice and men
Go often awry,
And leave us nothing but grief and pain,
For promised joy!
Still you are blessed, compared with me!
The present only touches you:
But oh! I backward cast my eye,
On prospects dreary!
And forward, though I cannot see,
I guess and fear!
The first stanza of the poem is read by Ian Anderson in the beginning of the 2007 remaster of "One Brown Mouse" by Jethro Tull. Anderson adds the line "But a mouse is a mouse, for all that," at the end of the stanza, which is a reference to another of Burns' songs, "Is There for Honest Poverty", commonly known as "A Man's a Man for A' That".
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!
| Standard English translation |
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Small, crafty, cowering, timorous little beast, O, what a panic is in your little breast! You need not start away so hasty With argumentative chatter! I would be loath to run and chase you, With murdering plough-staff. I'm truly sorry man's dominion Has broken Nature's social union, And justifies that ill opinion Which makes you startle At me, your poor, earth born companion And fellow mortal! I doubt not, sometimes, but you may steal; What then? Poor little beast, you must live! An odd ear in twenty-four sheaves Is a small request; I will get a blessing with what is left, And never miss it. Your small house, too, in ruin! Its feeble walls the winds are scattering! And nothing now, to build a new one, Of coarse grass green! And bleak December's winds coming, Both bitter and keen! You saw the fields laid bare and wasted, And weary winter coming fast, And cozy here, beneath the blast, You thought to dwell, Till crash! the cruel plough passed Out through your cell. That small bit heap of leaves and stubble, Has cost you many a weary nibble! Now you are turned out, for all your trouble, Without house or holding, To endure the winter's sleety dribble, And hoar-frost cold. But little Mouse, you are not alone, In proving foresight may be vain: The best laid schemes of mice and men Go often awry, And leave us nothing but grief and pain, For promised joy! Still you are blessed, compared with me! The present only touches you: But oh! I backward cast my eye, On prospects dreary! And forward, though I cannot see, I guess and fear! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_a_Mouse#cite_note-1 A Man's A Man For A' That1795 Type: Song Tune: For a' that.
Quotes about FICKLE: http://quotes.dictionary.com/search/fickle
"Fame is a fickle food
-Emily DickinsonUpon a shifting plate." Even the most fickle are faithful to a few bad habits. - Mason Cooley The passion for money is never fickle. - Mason Cooley Fame is fickle, but Obscurity is usually faithful to the end. - Mason Cooley We are a puny and fickle folk. Avarice, hesitation, and following are our diseases. Opinions are formed in a process of open discussion and public debate, and where no opportunity for the forming of opinions exists , there may be moods--moods of the masses and moods of individuals, the latter no less fickle and unreliable than the former--but no opinion. -- Hannah Arendt Young men have strong passions and tend to gratify them indiscriminately. Of the bodily desires, it is the sexual by which they ar e most swayed and in which they show absence of control...They are changeable and fickle in their desires which are violent while they last, but quickly over: their impulses are keen but not deep rooted. -- Aristotle Only when human sorrows are turned into a toy with glaring colors will baby people become interested--for a while at least. The people are a very fickle baby that must have new toys every day. -- Emma Goldman Gratitude is a fickle thing, indeed. A person taking aim presses the weapon to his chest and cheek, but when he hits, he discards it with indifference. --Franz Grillparzer All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise him. -- Gerhard Manley Hopkins fick·le[fik-uhl] Show IPA
adjective
1.
likely to change, especially due to caprice, irresolution, or instability; casually changeable: fickle weather.
2.
not constant or loyal in affections: a fickle lover.
Origin:
before 1000; Middle English fikel, Old English ficol deceitful, akin to fācen treachery, fician to deceive, gefic deception Related forms
fick·le·ness, noun
un·fick·le, adjective
Synonyms
1. unstable, unsteady, variable, capricious, fitful. 2. inconstant. 1, 2. Fickle, inconstant, capricious, vacillating describe persons or things that are not firm or steady in affection, behavior, opinion, or loyalty. Fickle implies an underlying perversity as a cause for the lack of stability: the fickle seasons, disappointing as often as they delight; once lionized, now rejected by a fickle public. Inconstant suggests an innate disposition to change: an inconstant lover, flitting from affair to affair. Capricious implies unpredictable changeability arising from sudden whim: a capricious administration constantly and inexplicably changing its signals; a capricious and astounding reversal of position. Vacillating means changeable due to lack of resolution or firmness: an indecisive, vacillating leader, apparently incapable of a sustained course of action. |
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